Book sizes

Discover the different sizes for books and ebooks you’ll need to know for publishing your masterpiece through Canva’s handy sizes guide!

Type	Dimension
Ebook
General	20.8 × 33.3 in
Kindle	22.2 × 35.6 in
Wattpad	7.1 × 11.1 in
Kobo	14.9 × 20.1 in
Book
Royal Folio	12.5 × 20 in
Royal Quatro	10 × 12.5 in
Royal Octavo	6.25 × 10 in
Royal Sixteenmo	5 × 6.25 in
Royal Thirty-Two Mo	3.13 × 5 in
Royal Sixty-Four Mo	2 × 5 in
Medium Folio	11.5 × 18 in
Medium Quatro	9 × 11.5 in
Medium Octavo	5.75 × 9 in
Medium Sixteenmo	4.5 × 5.75 in
Medium Thirty-Two Mo	2.88 × 4.5 in
Medium Sixty-Four Mo	2.25 × 2.88 in
Crown Folio	10 × 15 in
Crown Quatro	7.5 × 10 in
Crown Octavo	5 × 7.5 in
Crown Sixteenmo	3.75 × 5 in
Crown Thirty-Two Mo	2.5 × 3.75 in
Crown Sixty-Four Mo	1.88 × 2.5 in

The rise of self-publishing allows you to create your own books, whether it be for promoting your business, collating your family history, creating a lookbook for a client, and many more.

If some people indeed judge books by its cover, you’ll want them to have the best impression of yours. With an eye catching cover design, people are naturally drawn to your book and be curious enough to give it a flip.

Ebook sizes

When people first begin to to think of getting published, the tendency is to focus on ink and paper copies but for many indie or self-publishing authors, ebooks are still a great format for distributing your literary masterpiece. With ebooks, you’ll be able to distribute your work much faster and with no shipping costs, you’ll have access to readers from all around the globe.

One important element of your ebook is the cover. Because there’s no physical size, it can be confusing to figure out what sort of dimensions you’ll need for your ebook. Depending on which platform you publish, recommended dimensions might change.

Kindle

Kindle is Amazon’s own e-reader. It ties directly with Amazon’s online ebook and audiobook store. Amazon allows you to self-publish your own books. Their recommended ebook cover size is 2560 x 1600 pixels and a ratio of 1:1.6 They also accept two kinds of file types for your cover: JPEG and TIFF. To get the best image quality, make sure to save and upload an uncompressed file since Amazon will apply additional compression to your image.

Kobo

Another popular e-reader, Kobo’s recommends would-be authors to keep in mind that their standard eReader has a 1448 x 1072 resolution, which would be a good size to shoot for when creating your cover. They also recommend submitting an image with a 300 DPI resolution, no larger than 5 MB.

Wattpad

Wattpad is a powerful community for different kinds of stories. When it comes to creating your Wattpad cover, the recommended image size is 512 x 800 pixels. Sticking to this size will keep your covers looking great and attractive to more readers. As for the image format, it’s best to stick to JPEG or PNG.

General

While different platforms call for various dimensions, its also wouldn’t be practical to create different cover images to satisfy their requirements. If you’re planning to distribute your books to various publishers, you can follow the general sizing rule of keeping your cover image at least 1500 to 1800 pixels wide and stick to 1:1.6 ratio. Which means that if you have an image that’s 1500 pixels wide, multiply that with 1.6 and your image height should be 2400 pixels. You can also stick to a 300 DPI image as most publishers would apply their own compression. And that’s it! You’re ready to create a cover for your brilliant new ebook!

Book sizes explained

The names of book sizes, commonly used by librarians and publishers, are based on an old system that is still widely used today: the size of a page is considered a fraction of the large sheet of paper on which it was printed.

The terms include folio (the largest), quarto (smaller), and octavo (smaller yet). These terms historically referred to the format of the book and indicated the size of a leaf in terms of the size of the original sheet. Therefore, folio was a book printed on a sheet of paper folded once to produce two leaves (four pages), each half the size of the original printed sheet; quarto was printed on a sheet of paper folded twice to produce four leaves (eight pages), each one fourth the size of the original; and octavo was printed on a sheet folded four times to produce eight leaves (16 pages), one eighth the original size.

However, this system doesn’t indicate the size of the original sheet. Thus, the prefixes royal (large), medium (medium), and crown (small) are given to designate the general size of the paper. Therefore royal octavo is understood to designate a page one-eighth the size of a royal sheet, medium octavo a page one-eighth the size of a medium sheet, and crown octavo a page one-eighth the size of a crown sheet. But paper is cut into many sheet sizes so even these terms do not always designate sheets of the same dimensions.